The process of a company of transferring all or segments of its permanent recruitment to a third-party service provider is what RPO or recruitment process outsourcing is all about. In other words, your chosen RPO provider is responsible for the management of your company’s permanent recruitment.
An RPO provider will typically have its recruiters based on-site or off-site – embedded within your company’s HR function. Recruitment process outsourcing is a solution that brings enormous benefits to the table for companies and organisations that use it.
If you are facing problems with your talent acquisition or have a recruitment process that’s too lengthy and complicated, perhaps choosing one of the leading RPO providers in your region could help streamline your hiring process and speed it up.
How Do RPO Providers Function?
An RPO service provider typically starts with an agreement for the recruitment process outsourcing. Such an agreement outlines the project’s scope, cost, timing, and more. Often, the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) service provider and HR management (HRM) staff meet to discuss or create job descriptions.
This is followed by the RPO using its own prosperity methodologies and technology or that of the client’s systems, tools, and techniques to spread the word about the job opening. These days, social media recruiting is a large part of outsourced recruiting services to find qualified talent for your company fast.
As resumes of applicants interested in the open job start arriving, the RPO service provider screens and evaluates the candidates. Your chosen RPO provider may even come back to you if there are disconnects between what the job description says and what you really expect from the candidates, because it would need the job description to be tweaked suitably.
After your selected RPO team has gathered and screened the applicants during the preliminary stage, it may guide potential hires through pre-employment assessments, if necessary. When the RPO process is successful, you – as the employer, will just need to interview a handful of highly vetted potential hires to arrive at a final hiring decision.
By helping you make an informed decision, recruitment process outsourcing services help you hire talent faster and even prevent your company’s talent pipelines from running dry, which could help find qualified talent quicker and steer clear of several recruiting challenges while keeping your hiring costs down. No wonder why RPO solutions have steadily emerged as the number one choice of many companies and organisations.
Typical Recruiting vs. RPO
Traditional recruitment agencies are often involved to handle the recruitment process, which typically includes:
- Sourcing suitable candidates for vacant roles
- Screen candidates to make sure they possess the necessary skills
- Coordinate between the client and candidates throughout the recruitment process
- Guide candidates at every stage of the application and interview process
Sometimes, clients who hire these recruitment process outsourcing solution providers may even request the recruiters to be involved in every stage of the process.
In many ways, an external recruiter working for a recruitment process outsourcing firm operates just like an internal recruiter. However, there are some significant differences too.
Few companies and organisations have HR departments big enough to support full-time recruitment teams. As a result, HR staff members are often busy handling several other tasks besides permanent recruitment processes.
Full-time recruiters working with recruitment process outsourcing firms usually have deep industry knowledge and access to certain tools, technologies, and a robust professional network, all of which they leverage to locate and reach hard-to-find candidates. In-house professionals may not be familiar with or have access to such knowledge, tools, techniques, and network.
For instance, an RPO firm is more likely to know the social media platforms or specialized websites that can attract the talent they are looking to find. Even if one lead fails, they will continue looking for high-quality talent until they find a suitable candidate. This is unlike in-house recruitment professionals, who will use traditional methods and sit back if no results are yielded, thus making the open roles stay open until someone suitable is finally hired.
Why Consider Outsourcing Your Recruitment Function?
Finding qualified candidates to meet your hiring volumes is crucial to maintain your competitive advantage over your closest competitors. If your hiring processes falter and can’t find suitable talent faster, hiring an external provider who can help you find the top talent is inevitable. And this is where a recruitment process outsourcing solution provider can help.
RPO services score over traditional staffing agencies. Whether you need end-to-end RPO, on-demand RPO, or an RPO service provider to handle your permanent staffing needs regularly, you can freely choose one that seems the right choice for all your requirements.
If you are still not sure why outsourced recruiting or forging an RPO partnership is good to streamline and accelerate your company’s talent acquisition process and even bring some additional benefits your way, you should take note of the following:
- Top-notch talent acquisition: Looking for C-suite candidates? Need to make some quick executive hires? Have entry-level posts to fill? Whatever be your permanent hiring needs, outsourcing recruitment to a third-party provider helps. Since an RPO provider’s key purpose is to help you acquire the best hires for your business quickly and cost-effectively, it pays to work with a competent one.
- Gain business agility with better workforce planning: With their innovative and proprietary sourcing and screening strategies, use of AI-powered recruitment technologies, and proven-to-work employer branding and talent marketing techniques, RPO providers bring you useful market insights, dig deeper into talent analytics, and find and engage the best talent faster. All these facilitate your workforce planning and even help in employer branding to make your company a great place to attract top talent.
- Cost-efficiency: For your business, any form of cost savings is welcome as you can route that money saved to core business matters or fields that need the investment urgently. Since recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) providers reduce your reliance on third-party agencies, they also bring down your hiring costs. You can even avoid investing in internal resources while benefiting from talent marketing, specialized sourcing, candidate management, and onboarding expertise by working with a company offering tailored RPO solutions to meet your needs. And the icing on the cake? Despite reduced hiring costs, you still get access to the best and most varied talent pool for niche and in-demand skills to source qualified candidates faster.
- Position your company as an employer many others would like to work for: Is your employee turnover high? Do you struggle to recruit and retain top talent? Are your recruitment processes biased that drive away some specific candidates (read, people of colour, women, transgender, etc.)? If yes, all these could be driving suitable candidates away. By working with an RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) provider, you can build a diverse workforce, have a more impartial hiring approach and an inclusive culture, and create a strong talent pool for future needs. All these will mitigate risks with roles lying open for long, which would have otherwise adversely affected your productivity and even market reputation.
- Go global: If your company has dreams to expand its operations to foreign shores, standardised sourcing, hiring, and onboarding processes are a must. Since a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider will support globalisation, you can work with one to recruit for multiple posts quickly. Instead of spending a lot on hiring multiple recruitment companies for filling diverse roles in foreign lands, a centralized RPO provider is more efficient and faster, which makes it prudent business sense to hire one.
- Compliant hiring practices and scalability: With their compliant hiring practices, an RPO provider will reduce your business risks in terms of penalties and fines for non-adherence. If you plan to expand your business to foreign lands, open a new department, or add new roles to an existing department, you would need several permanent staff members as quickly as possible to make your plans work. Traditional hiring routes and processes could take months to find and hire the right talent, thus defying your first-mover’s advantage. RPO providers help build process and technological infrastructure within your business that’s adaptable to any situation, thus letting you scale up or down your team, whenever necessary.
Is RPO a Good Fit for Your Company?
Now that you know what is RPO in recruitment and its benefits, it’s time to answer another vital question – if it will work for you.
When your in-house hiring managers fail to hire the right candidates fast, it will be wise to consider a “Project RPO.” An RPO will work quite similar to your own talent acquisition team, or rather, much better, if truth be told.
Compared to other conventional recruiting options, providers of RPO services can handle high-volume hiring for large organizations at a lower cost. Over the last few years, RPO partners have evolved to offer companies and organisations strategic talent acquisition solutions that are flexible and customised. They also bring additional benefits that small and medium-sized organizations can adopt to meet their hiring needs.
Wrapping Up
If you are looking to attract excellent candidate quality for your open posts, hire fast, position your employer brand favourably, and stay on top of key hiring trends, joining hands with a competent RPO partner can pay rich dividends. Will you now hire an RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) provider? Or do you already use one to make the most of the benefits it brings to the table?
This article was written by InHunt World